Over the past 6 months I’ve run into a couple of brand new Dell machines that after running for a couple of hours, had this same problem. They both showed only the desktop with no icons and no Start menu\/task bar. In each case, booting into safe mode worked but didn’t shed much light on how to fix it. Dell’s tech support got me started with the PC Restore process as the best fix.<\/p>\n
Since I don’t look forward to calling Dell’s tech support again for this issue I just wanted to put right here on my blog the way to trigger the on-disk factory reset or recovery procedure: Repeatedly tap Ctrl-F11 just as the computer is booting up.<\/span> That is, from the computer completely off, you can hold down Ctrl, hit the power button , and tap F11 every second or so until the Dell Symantec recovery process starts.<\/p>\n When I did it the other day it showed the process was run by version 8.3 of Symantec’s ghost. That’s a little extra trivia I’m throwing in so if you find something different when you run your PC Restore feel free to drop me a line. Hopefully you don’t have to run this but if you do, you can save yourself 15-30 minutes of useless troubleshooting. Good luck fellow techies.<\/p>\n If you know how to run other hidden utilities, who not leave it for me as a comment? Pretty please? You may save a lot of people a lot of time…including me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the past 6 months I’ve run into a couple of brand new Dell machines that after running for a couple of hours, had this same problem. They both showed only the desktop with no icons and no Start menu\/task bar. In each case, booting into safe mode worked but didn’t shed much light on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-default"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}